Mining engineering consultancy operating system
Studies, reserves reporting, secondments, due diligence and expert work for a mine engineering consultancy, plus a planning studio for haulage, strip progress and blending.
The problem
A mine engineering consultancy runs many kinds of work at once: concept, pre-feasibility and feasibility studies, reserve statements that a Competent Person must sign, mine schedules, haulage and dragline studies, due diligence with data rooms, expert witness reports with court deadlines, and engineers seconded to client sites. Each job has its own team, software licences, site access requirements and deliverables. Most of it is tracked in spreadsheets, inboxes and engineers' heads, so utilisation, deadlines and invoicing slip.
What we built
An illustrative operating system for a mine engineering consultancy, with views for the principal, engineering manager, project engineers, study managers and accounts.
- Opportunities to engagements: enquiry, scope call, proposal drafted by AI from past similar jobs for the principal to approve, signed engagement, kickoff. Win rate and pipeline value by service line.
- Study and project board: every job by phase (scoping, data review, design, scheduling, costing, reporting, peer review, issued), with the lead engineer, hours used against budget and the next deliverable.
- Reserves and compliance: reserve statement workflow from data received to modifying factors, pit optimisation, schedule, economic test, peer review and Competent Person sign-off. The system tracks evidence and approvals; only the Competent Person signs.
- Due diligence data rooms: document requests to the vendor, received and reviewed, questions log, red flags, findings report.
- Expert work: expert witness and joint expert report matters with court and filing deadlines, conflict checks and strict document control.
- Secondments and site access: engineers placed at client sites on rosters, with site inductions, medicals, tickets and travel tracked so nobody arrives unable to work.
- People and capacity: engineer skills and availability, allocation across jobs, leave, timesheets and utilisation, professional registrations and CPD.
- Software licences: mine planning software seats by engineer and job, renewals and costs recharged to projects.
- Billing: milestone and time-based invoices drafted from timesheets and deliverables, sent to the accounting system for approval, with overdue reminders.
- Planning studio (the kind of tools the consultancy builds for clients): a haulage cycle simulator (haul distance, grade, rolling resistance and payload change cycle time, fleet need and fuel burn), a strip and block progress matrix for a dragline operation, a blending calculator against quality targets, and scheduled against actual tonnes.
- Guardrails: no sign-off on reserves, expert reports or client deliverables without the responsible engineer; client data stays in its own data room; nothing goes to a client without approval.
The board at a glance
| Scoping | Data review | Design | Scheduling | Peer review | Issued |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Job 2611, concept study | Job 2607, due diligence | Job 2602, dump design | Job 2598, life of mine schedule | Job 2594, reserve statement | Job 2589, haulage study |
Connects to
Mine planning software ("Deswik, XPAC, Vulcan or similar") for schedules and designs, Microsoft 365 and SharePoint for data rooms and document control, project time and billing ("Harvest, Productive or similar"), accounting ("Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks"), e-signing, Microsoft Teams. Exact connections are confirmed during discovery.
Outcome
Illustrative: designed from how mine engineering consultancies run, not built for a specific firm.
